


like a barnful of feathers

by pearthery



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Gintama
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Joui War, M/M, Shoka Sonjuku, Yorozuya Family, and others are just there, but it's all atla, gintoki as a character blows me away and everyone in this fic agrees :))), i went very wild with this, lots of things are metaphors and symbolism, the best combination!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28340841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearthery/pseuds/pearthery
Summary: "Where did you learn this?" Shinpachi finally asks, one evening. "Are you a waterbender?""Nah," Gin-san responds, his voice muffled, halfway past comatose and lying face-down in the grass. The sound of muted conversations coast around them. "My wisdom's just overflowing. I should get paid for tutoring you—oi, make sure to tell your sister. My tutoring services aren't cheap, but I guess I could give you a bit of an employee discount. I take bribes too. Hey, hey, icebenders can make ice cream, can't they? What about a parfait? Frozen yogurt? Pattsuan—"The air nomads were killed in the Kansei Purge. Kabukicho is a port town on the Southeast coast of the Earth Kingdom. Gintoki does not bend. Nothing changes all that much.[A Gintama ATLA Fusion AU]
Relationships: Kagura & Sakata Gintoki & Shimura Shinpachi, Katsura Kotarou & Sakamoto Tatsuma & Sakata Gintoki & Takasugi Shinsuke, Otose | Terada Ayano & Sakata Gintoki, Sakamoto Tatsuma/Sakata Gintoki, Sakata Gintoki & Yoshida Shouyou, Sakata Gintoki/Takasugi Shinsuke
Comments: 36
Kudos: 122





	like a barnful of feathers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Official_Biscuit_Moron](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Official_Biscuit_Moron/gifts).



> merry christmas biscuit i love you it's really late right now and i'm going to go to sleep soon but i hope you enjoy this gintama atla au that occupied my brain for such a long time!!!!!!!!!!!!! if there are any typos, i'm sorry!!!!!!!!!

_like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire_

_but fire was on everything the wild mustard_

_  
__._ _  
  
_

_it’s true I suppose you grow to love the creatures you create_

_some of them come out with pupils swirling others with teeth_

  
  


“Gin-chan,” Kagura says, mouse-quiet and hesitant. “Do you hate firebenders?” 

Her hands are twisted into each other behind her back where Gintoki can’t see them, but if he could, he thinks her fingers would be curved and her nails digging into her palms. Fingers burning up like hot coals, or like dry twigs crackling, swallowed up in the fireplace, heat radiating from her skin and bleeding out from the marrow of her bones. 

“Huh?” He grunts out, cheek pressed to the wood of his desk—sticky from a bit of strawberry milk that spilled earlier today, when he’d knocked the carton over— and he peers up at her with bleary eyes. “Course not. That’s a damn bother. The only people you should hate are people who pretend they’re main characters and ninjas who steal the last JUMP magazines on Saturdays.”

Kagura looks at him, hands still hidden. “Are you scared of them?”

“No,” Gintoki says again, sitting up. “Why’re you asking? Did something happen? Who stole your JUMP, Kagura-chan? I’ll get it back for you. Trust me.” Gintoki is an expert in fighting people for JUMP magazines. If there was a tournament for this sort of thing, he would definitely be a finalist, in fact, he would decimate the competition, because he loves JUMP so much. 

“Earlier,” says Kagura, not talking about JUMP, “when I set the sukonbu boxes on fire, accidentally, before breakfast, and it got on the table all of a sudden, and it was very nice actually, like a lovely morning bonfire—“

“Pattsuan started crying because of the smoke.” 

“—and the table started turning fashionably black, remember Gin-chan, kind of like Anego’s fried eggs, except even though it was the same shade of black, our smoke wasn’t purple or glowing like Anego's always is, but it was soft and grey and smelled like burnt wood and paper and sukonbu if you put it on a grill, do you remember that Gin-chan?” 

“A bit,” says Gintoki. “Our clothes still smell, by the way.” 

Kagura nods. “That’s fashion nowadays. 4D fashion. The kind you can smell. Anyway, you were being irresponsible as always and instead of putting the fire out straight away, you just stood there staring at it, and I thought you were gonna propose or something, uh-huh.” She brings her hands up and twitches her fingers, hands splayed out on the ends of her outstretched arms, her mouth a thin line across her jaw.“But then I looked at your eyes and it was like there was nothing inside. Like your brain had spilled out like your strawberry milk—splotch, all over the table, and the floor, and Sadaharu’s favourite chew toys.” 

Gintoki says nothing. 

“So I thought maybe you don’t like fire? Or maybe you suddenly got traumatised because Sadaharu's favourite chew toys—sorry, I mean your slippers—got gross and sticky like you. But I know the Fire Nation colonised the Earth Kingdom, and maybe I shouldn’t be here—"

“Are you scared?” 

Kagura freezes. Inhales sharply. 

“It’s not bad to be scared,” says Gintoki, leaning back in his seat and letting his head fall back. Through the window he can see a bustling street, with vendors calling out and shopfronts open and people making their way through the town, smiling and laughing and startling at loud voices, before easing into that special type of fond exasperation that comes with living in such a raucous, rambunctious place. "Even if it's of yourself."

“I used to know a couple firebenders,” he says into the air, “so I know some of their tricks. Firebending comes from your chi, right? You have to make it yourself. It’d be a pain to control that.” 

Sort of like releasing a wild animal, he thinks, or raising a child. The first spark is the starting line, the only thing your fingers can reach, and the rest of it spirals away, soaking the fragile wooden scaffolding in gasoline and holding a lighter to the base, and the rest of it lights up in flames, reaching towards the sky and simmering down to the ground, crumbling in the ashes. 

“But I want to,” says Kagura, her eyes like sunlight through the surface of a clear pond. “I don’t want to be like the rest of the Yato.” 

Gintoki looks at her, her hands bound into fists at her sides. He thinks about candles melting and candlewicks burning and wildfires casting red-orange-yellow light on grass, tossing heat into canopies, and charred remains of tree trunks and the bones of many forests and fireworks and stars and suns and things that blaze out of control until they burn themselves away. 

“Okay,” he says. 

°°°

This is what Amane knows of Otose's boy: he is a nonbender. No soothing water running parallel to his veins, no ethereal connection to the moon, or the sea, or even the shallow well that sits just outside Otose's bar. No stony look, no knuckles like the ridges of great mountain ranges, no tough, granite bones. No earth pulsing in his chest. No damn fire, no damned fire burning up in his eyes, or burning down their houses. No air, because the air nomads are dead. 

Otose's boy is a nonbender—one day she'd brought him home from the cold, and the both of them had been damp from snow, and she'd dragged him in through the door and heaved him into the seats at the back of the bar, and the next night he was sleeping in her upstairs rooms, and the night after that he was pouring the old woman's sake, and then he'd never left.

He does odd jobs around the building, chops wood, carries things back and forth on his bony shoulders, grumbling the whole time but still trudging across town to deliver bundles weighing just as much as, if not more than, his thin frame. 

They get all sorts of people here, merchants and vendors and traders and sailors and seekers, useless bums and slick entrepreneurs, and they get soldiers too, with too much bravado and too much malice—the young, senseless kind. 

But as far as Amane's heard, all that Otose's boy ever does is stare them down dully and walk on, somehow vanishing in a matter of seconds and never getting caught. Except by Otose herself. But that woman's a miracle—sturdy and firm and strong as the earth she bends to her will.

Otose gets him to cook, sometimes, for both her and her customers, and Amane—on the nights she goes drinking and chats to the old bar owner—arches an eyebrow at the magnitude of her trust, that she'd let her stray manage her meals, and Otose puffs on her pipe and says, "He's a good cook. I'd be damned to overlook that." 

Full disclosure: he's not an easy boy to overlook. Red eyes, hair like seafoam, the way he moves like both a hunter and something hunted, leaning on corner-sides and storefronts like a worn umbrella and draping over Otose's counters like damp cloth. Makes surprisingly good food and strangely enough knows a repertoire of ancient, traditional Earth Kingdom folk songs. The sort of songs that only old scholars know these days. 

He's a nice boy, she supposes. Bit of a no-name, a bit mysterious, a bit unknown. Popped out of nowhere, but that's on brand for everyone in Kabukicho, port town as they are, melting pot of benders and nonbenders from all three nations. Mouthy, until he's not. Excessive sweet tooth. Exceptionally crude. Whoever had raised him had obviously been rather liberal about his education. 

But a nice boy. He'd called her a 'bitch of a hag' in one breath and then promised to fix her roof in another, albeit in an unnecessarily roundabout way. Would've been easier with an earthbender, that's for sure, and they'd do it a lot faster, but the charm of Otose's stray is that he shows up even when people say they can't pay him and then grins a sleazy grin. Amane thinks she could learn to like him.

°°°

"And what are you? A little vulture?"

°°°

A samurai: is Shinpachi's first impression. A weird samurai, and somehow a genuine one: is his second. An incorrigible lazy-ass natural perm who obviously doesn't know a thing about ethical business management and employee treatment: is his third, and his fourth, and fifth and sixth, and so on and on and on, because after realising this, Shinpachi's rose-tinted glasses were flung away and replaced by a brazen and shameless reality, and he grew up and realised that the path to adulthood is littered with disappointments.

It's not what he expected. To be honest, Shinpachi isn't really sure what he'd expected. 

This is kind of what he thought things would be like: he'd work in a couple cafes and restaurants, Aneue would work in the cabaret club, and together, they'd be able to scrounge together enough protection money to pay off the gang in their area of Kabukicho, and maybe once he was older, Shinpachi could work at the docks, and he'd earn more money, pay them off for years and years instead of just a few months, and Aneue wouldn't have to work so hard, and they'd have more free time, and one day, one day they'd be able to restore their father's legacy and teach waterbending by the sea. 

Shinpachi's not very good at it. Streams tremulously follow his fingers, if they follow at all, and his grasp on the water slips through his fingers so easily he might as well not be bending. But Aneue? Aneue bends like she breathes—she's so strong, she can turn pillars of water whip-thin and sharp, and even though she can't make ice yet, the air temperature drops harshly whenever she is mad, and whenever their freezer breaks and there's a carton of Bargain Dash that's on the verge of melting before she can eat it. 

Aneue could protect the both of them. She does. She did. But a single girl—not even a master waterbender, only partially trained—protecting herself and her brother, and a brother, terrified, petrified, whose bending was so weak he'd be better off with a bucket—they didn't stand all that much of a chance against four grown men, and they didn't stand a chance against Fire Nation soldiers. No matter how much Shinpachi had screamed, or Aneue had bit back, with her tongue or her cold, cutting water-whip, they'd still stormed into the abandoned dojo and set it aflame. 

And when they took Aneue, as a prisoner for the Fire Nation, or as some sort of terrible specimen, and Shinpachi had been left to douze the blaze, he wondered why they were the ones who were singled out. He knew the answer, of course: they didn't try to stay under the radar, other benders hid and mingled with each other safely and secretly, and Shinpachi and Tae were broadcasting their bending, they were trying to raise funds for a school, and though Kabukicho was overlooked, and most people fell to the side of the Fire Nation's scrutiny, they'd been caught in the end, and it was their own fault, obviously—but still. He wondered. 

This is how things turned out, if you were wondering: the samurai that had saved him at the cafe and spontaneously baked a cake in their tiny kitchen had strolled down to the docks and sunk the Fire Nation ship with just a sword, and Aneue was safe (and bloodthirsty, but when isn't she, to be honest) and suddenly, Shinpachi got a new job, and the thing is, Sakata Gintoki pays him no wages at all, and that would be a real big problem if not for the fact that Shinpachi gets pocket money instead, and if he shows up early enough, he gets cereal or a meal of rice and random toppings instead of black matter for breakfast. 

And the thing is, Gin-san watches him practice his bending, and though he never stands up and goes through his own routines—Shinpachi never even sees him practice with his sword—he calls out random pointers and sits down with him at the riverbank late into the evening, casually drawling out Naruto or HunterXHunter quotes about training arcs that strangely make Shinpachi feel inspired, either by the inspirational quality of them, or by the inspirational desire to hit the man, and the water flows around his hands like Gin-san's low, quiet voice.

"Where did you learn this?" Shinpachi finally asks, one evening. "Are you a waterbender?"

"Nah," Gin-san responds, his voice muffled, halfway past comatose and lying face-down in the grass. The sound of muted conversations coast around them. "My wisdom's just overflowing. I should get paid for tutoring you—oi, make sure to tell your sister. My tutoring services aren't cheap, but I guess I could give you a bit of an employee discount. I take bribes too. Hey, hey, icebenders can make ice cream, can't they? What about a parfait? Frozen yogurt? Pattsuan—"

Shaking his head, Shinpachi returns to practice. He inhales deeply and curves his hand gently, fingertips arched upwards, and strokes his hand down, his palms turning in as he brings them back from the ends of his stretched arms and pulls up. The river swells slightly, and the surface dips, giving way to a large wave that makes its way to the bank. It's as high as a man is tall, and Shinpachi tucks his chin into his chest and lets the water crash back down and thinks in wonder about how far he's come. 

He turns his head towards Gin-san, still sprawled out and supine under the sunset. His hair is bright with the fading light and his arm is thrown over his face. The air is cold. His breath puffs into steam, white and wispy like clouds across a horizon.

°°°

"I hate it when you do that," Zura says, running his nails over the gravel. "I don't think it's fair."

Gintoki thumbs the hilt of his sword and faces away, in the direction Tatsuma and Takasugi headed when they went to get firewood. "Whaddya talking about? 

"You know. Would you stop avoiding the topic?"

"I don't. I'm not. Are you tipsy? I thought you were smart enough not to drink with those guys. Look, right now they're wandering round the forest like lumberjacks, and you're delirious. You're really a lightweight, aren't you. Those two are monsters, remember?"

Zura plants his feet firmly in the dirt, toes curling. A sinkhole forms silently beside them and Gintoki glances warily into its depths, wondering how long it would take him to climb back up if Zura uncharacteristically decided to shove him in. Takasugi would laugh so hard. Poor Tatsuma would laugh until he cried. 

And if any one of them decided to make things hard for him, the only thing he'd be able to do would be to throw pebbles. By hand. Manually. Not even with magic powers or anything. Ah, goddamn it's hard to be a nonbender with friends who can cause earthquakes on a whim.

"Don't do that. I'm not stupid, Gintoki. I can tell. When you play dumb. Or deflect. When you go out on the battlefield and brandish yourself like a beacon, pretending like you're the only one worth killing. It's not fair." 

"Lots of things aren't fair," Gintoki says. He folds his legs and sits cross-legged, ignoring how the dirt sticks to his white haori. It's already stained anyway. "That's what alcoholism is for. Where'd you get the booze? I thought we were stocking up for emergencies. Did you finally snap out of your goody-two-shoes persona? Are you a bad-boy now? I bet Hanako-san would be into that." 

"What? Don't talk about Hanako-san like that," Zura frowns. His forehead is creased and Gintoki's not foolish enough to think he's forgotten what they're talking about, but the other boy lets it go for the moment, for Hanako-san's sake. He's so whipped. "It's disrespectful, and she's the only healer we're in contact with right now." 

"Yeah. I heard. Waterbenders are hard to find." 

"Did Takasugi tell you that?"

"It's not a secret, Zura. They've been launching attacks on the Water Tribes. Anyone with a brain and magic powers is going underground." 

Zura looks solemn, the way he always does when he's been thinking a lot. "That would be the smart thing to do. Their technology is getting more advanced." 

"Fucking laser," says Gintoki, tired and almost vicious. The Fire Nation's laser cannon had killed dozens of their men, and injured countless more—left them with blistering wounds and horror-widened eyes. Those that survived had been able to throw up rock shelters in time, if they were earthbenders, or had thrown themselves to safety, if they weren't. 

"You got hit," Zura says, quieter than he was before. "Your leg. How is it?" 

"Pretty good actually. Good thing lasers don't make you bleed, huh. I bet Takasugi would burst a blood vessel if he had to cauterise another wound. Remember when he tried to set my arm on fire? Crazy little pyromaniac. Ah, you may be right, Zura. We're lucky Hanako-san's here."

"Takasugi's fine. If you weren't in front of him, he would've lost a hand."

"Oh," says Gintoki. "Yeah. I forgot about that. Guess he owes me. Whaddya think he'd cough up, Zura? Maybe his coat. I've been wanting to get a new blanket, and Takasugi's probably tucked a bunch of hellfire under his armpits, so it'd be pretty warm. Hey, I'll get you something from that guy too, if you want." 

"I have the ointment for your leg. You should apply it now and go to bed." 

"Yeah, yeah, thanks. I kinda owe you for that, so just tell me what you want. An arm? A leg? An eye? Eye for an eye for an eye? He'd probably rather die than give me anything, though, so no promises." 

"I don't think it's safe for you," says Zura, tight-lipped. 

"Course not. Being around Takasugi is inherently dangerous, you know. But since he owes me, I'm safe for now. We should take advantage." 

"I mean it, Gintoki. It's not safe." 

"Zura, it's not a secret. But trust me—I'm in the lead so far. Definitely at least 3 wins ahead of that midget. I'll breeze past him before he can even think about shooting lightning at my dick, I promise." 

"Gintoki—"

"Who taught him how to lightning bend anyway? Takasugi's the last person who should be playing with thunder—I mean, can he even see the storm clouds? He's so short that last time we went to the bar he had to stand on his tiptoes to see over the counter, haha, what a lame ass!" 

"—listen to me—"

"Wait—okay, I get it. It's like a power play. When those Fire Nation bastards see that we have a guy who can pew-pew lightning from his fingers when their armies can't, they'll be so ashamed that they'll surrender, psychological warfare, I get i—"

"—you shouldn't be here!"

Gintoki falls silent. "Zura." 

"I don't think it's safe for you. Gintoki. You know that—"

"I know I'm not as smart as you or Takasugi, or even Tatsuma," Gintoki cuts in. "Strategy flies over my head. But you need me. I'm here."

"You can't bend. All you have is a sword. What was it you said earlier, anyone with a brain and magic powers—you have neither!"

"Well, that's what they don't expect. I bet—"

Zura cries out. "I refuse to bet on your _life!_ Aren't you afraid? You're a nonbender in a war where people are flinging around fire, earth, water around you like monsters—there's lightning, molten earth, people are dying, benders are dying, Gintoki, and you're fighting on the frontlines, _you_ could die at any moment and the only thing you have is a flimsy sword, you can't reshape the world to keep yourself alive—aren't you scared? Can't you be scared? Won't you be afraid?" 

"Zura."

"I'm not naive. We all know why you wear that damn haori—so they'll concentrate their fire towards you. It's your stupid main character syndrome. I hate it. We have more freedom to use our bending at the cost of your safety. You can't think that's fair."

"Zura," says Gintoki. "I'm afraid." 

"What?"

"Of course I'm afraid. So are you. We're at war. Nothing's fair. But if I can make sure you guys are out of the fray, so you can—I dunno, so you can throw boulders, you and Tatsuma, or so Takasugi can kamehameha fireballs back into the cesspit—that's good enough for me."

Zura drags his hands down his face, leaving dust trails running from the corners of his eyes like tear tracks. The sides of the sinkhole tremble, sending bits of stray earth and debris shaking down its inward slopes. 

The gash closes, jagged edges fitting together clumsily, and Gintoki knows that the earth here is fragile now. "I hate it when you do this. When you burst out with a monologue that I can feel in my bones and it makes sense. Sometimes I think you have only one card left in your deck and you're going to put it down and no one knows what it is."

"That's kind of the point, Zura," Gintoki says. "That's how you win UNO."

Last week, Takasugi had pawned off their cards to buy rice from a farmer's boy, so they can't play anymore. The metaphor's out of place. But it's the sentiment of the thing. 

"It's not Zura," says Zura, his voice hoarse and torn up. He sounds defeated. "It's Katsura."

°°°

The fingers reach his cheek, stroking the damp skin. Despite himself, his eyes slide shut.

°°°

"So," Ayano muses off-handedly, partly to herself, and partly to the shaggy head slumped on her counter, "where are you from? You never told me."

Gintoki makes a low, wretched noise at her. Damn hungover moron, not knowing how to pace his drinking. "Does it really matter?" he grumbles. "Look at you, you're obviously from hell, but no one talks about it cause it's impolite."

Ayano snorts. "I'm Kabukicho born and raised, I'll have you know. And maybe I wanna learn about the guy living above my shop. Is that so wrong of me?" She taps her foot on the tile floor of the bar and a rock juts out to hit Gintoki in the shin. At his startled, affronted yelp, she casts a self-satisfied glance in his direction, smirking at his pained face.

"Uuhhhh," Gintoki winces. "Guess not." He heaves himself into a normal sitting position and rubs his ankle gingerly. 

"Exactly. You don't get landladies like me anywhere, you shitty brat, so you better appreciate it. I'm one in a million." 

Gintoki wrinkles his nose at her and munches down on a savoury pancake he bought from a passing vendor this morning, folding the circle of dough into a crumpled ball and shoving it in his mouth. He does this with so much of his food—bread rolls, omelettes, rice—like he's trying to break the world record for the least amount of bites needed to eat a leg of crispy pork roast.

Ayano huffs. Teenagers and their idiosyncrasies. Did no one teach this child how to eat? Bold of him to talk about manners when he so obviously lacks them himself.

But maybe it's a custom wherever he's from. One customer who'd hobbled into her bar on a late evening had never seen a chopstick before in his life. Maybe squishing up your food in your fist is some sort of breakfast ritual in the Swamp Tribes? Some small Earth Kingdom village? Or maybe Gintoki's just a degenerate little monster. 

The degenerate little monster looks at her and cranes his head up at the ceiling. Swallowing the bolus, he says, "So you remember what things were like before the Fire Nation, then?"

Ayano pauses. Ah. That's an interesting question. She doesn't talk about it much. The pain might not be fresh anymore, but the bitter scent of it still lingers.

Kabukicho wasn't hit so hard. They're close to the sea, so the invasion was ostensibly about securing a coastal position and potential trade routes, but they're too small to be of very much importance. Neither the Fire Nation nor the Earth Kingdom seem to care all that much about the type of lowlives that are found here.

"They destroyed a lot of the town when they first occupied us," she says after a while. "My old workplace got trashed. They're a lot more relaxed about us now. Probably because we're too far from the Fire Nation and from Ba Sing Se for troops to be sent over regularly. We're not worth the effort."

Gintoki licks the inside of his cheek and looks thoughtful. 

"You're an earthbender. They'd have tried to kill you." 

The glasses clink as Ayano sets the one she's been polishing down beside the others. "You can't tell if someone's a bender by their looks," she says, nudging the open door shut with a strategically manoeuvred brick. "It's not worth the effort to filter us out. You stay quiet, you stay alive. Common sense."

Gintoki nods, and Ayano's relieved despite herself to know he understands. 

"I'm leftover from the Kansei purges," he says finally. "Dunno if I'm a bender or not." 

"I see," she hums, fixing her gaze on his lowered eyes, red like a dusk-soaked sky. "I suppose it doesn't really matter."

°°°

The man that has approached him has thin-fingered hands and hair like dead grass and cliff edges. He crouches in the shadow of the pile of bodies that the boy is perched on and gazes up at him with shadowed eyes, like a strange thing, balancing between worlds, the world of the living in the valley beyond, with its lanterned houses and bustling streets, and the world of the long gone in the temples on the dead mountain.

"They say these fields are haunted by the ghosts of the airbenders," he says, cocking his head, "who curse the flesh of the soldiers that killed them. They say an ancient demon roams here, eating the eyes of dead men."

The boy glowers and reaches for his sword. The rusted blade leans awkwardly on his shoulder because it is too big and too heavy for his small hands, but he strains the muscles in his arms and points it at the stranger.

"But you aren't a ghost, or a demon, are you?" the man murmurs. "The dead do not know fear. Only the living are so scared."

The air is still, so still.

°°°

Today in class, they are learning about the Kansei purges. 

"The true story of it," says Shoyo, and Shinsuke wonders about the sobriety in his voice. "Many false rumours have been told about what happened, but I will give you the most honest account I can."

He tells them about airbenders and the air nomads—"Different categories," he insists. "Those that lived outside the air temples would have been called nomads, while most children, and the monks and nuns stayed in the temples."—and their bison, great and white and grand, and their mischievous flying lemurs, and the dizzying heights of the mountain ranges they lived in, and he tells them about their architecture, the shapes of their temples, wide and open and echoing, with gaps and drops that spoke so clearly of a people for whom the ground was only an afterthought. 

The airbenders liked to travel, he says, even those that were sedentary. They had friends and families living in all of the other nations, and they visited them often, bringing fruits and pies and warm smiles like coastal breezes, and peace. Peace.

Shoyo tells them all this with solemn eyes and his head lowered, as if he can't bear to look up at the sky. 

"They were pacifists," he tells them. He speaks about the killings, how the new Avatar was to be born amongst the airbenders, how the Fire Nation armies crawled up the mountainsides and smashed the temples, felled the pale, smooth pillars and left them cracked and crumbling in the dirt, and how the bison toppled from the clouds with harpoons and spears through their large dark eyes. And he speaks about the smell, the stench of burnt human flesh, the heavy, lingering weight of death that choked the villages nearby. 

Shoyo tells them about the wounds on the soldiers that returned. Clean, sharp gashes. Tiny, measured cuts close to arteries and veins, each laceration designed to be efficient, as close to painlessness as possible. 

"When the air bison started to fall," says Shoyo, "they began to fight differently." He doesn't say 'desperation' but the way he describes the rest of the injuries, the ones on the dead and the near dead sounds enough like the very word. Blood smears and crushed bones at the base of the cliffs, fractured skulls—casualties of panicked blasts of air. 

"Compressed air is dangerous," says Shoyo, "and especially so if it enters the bloodstream." Dozens of soldiers that survived the initial assault died later in their camps because the air blocked the flow of their blood within their bodies. Others returned with dulled hearing. Wretched wounds where the flesh had been twisted and ripped into, and scraps of skin flapped wetly over torn muscle. Limbs that couldn't have been sliced off neater with even the sharpest steel. 

And yet, he tells them, the airbenders are dead. 

Shoyo lets them leave the classroom after that, in an act of somewhat kindness. They step tentatively outside into the garden surrounding the school, breathing in air that reminds them of a people who were as free and flimsy and lifeless, now, as the element they bended. 

Every time Shinsuke looks to the hills, he thinks of echoing, intricate temples hanging on cliff sides, falling to the ground. Zura looks hollow and unhuman.

"Kotaro," Shoyo asks gently, guilty for telling them the truth. "Are you alright?"

"It's just, Sensei… There were children in the air temples, weren't there? The Fire Nation just killed them? "

"It was a genocide, Zura," Shinsuke bites out. "No exceptions." 

He ignores their looks towards him and kicks his foot into Gintoki's side as he snores. He'd trudged out of the classroom and slumped down in the grass like he was playing dead, and now he has his cheek squished against the dirt, and Shinsuke feels ire burning under his skin. Why is he sleeping? Why is Shoyo letting him sleep? This is really unfair.

"Come here," says Shoyo softly. "I didn't tell you before… but there is something else that perhaps you should know…"

"Shoyo?"

"To become an airbending master, an airbender must master the thirty-six tiers of airbending, or create a new technique. Innovation is difficult, and some benders may choose never to become a master—"

"Why?" Shinsuke demands, despite himself. He'd give anything to master his firebending. 

"—because the last tier of airbending is one that exists only for the purpose of taking a life," Shoyo says. "People never expected the air nomads to have one of the cruelest techniques. Suffocation is a painful thing. But many people, if you were to ask them, would say they would prefer it over burning to death.

Zura catches on faster than Shinsuke and he inhales so sharply that the air could have cut into his lungs.

"There's a rumour," Shoyo says, "that when the Fire Nation armies stormed the temples and trapped the airbenders, the monks that were still alive sealed up the nurseries and drained out the air, and when the soldiers broke in, the children were already dead."

Gintoki remains asleep, breathing softly into the evening mist. Shoyo reaches over and strokes his head.

°°°

Tama's a strange case. 

Her father, from a passing nomadic tribe, had brought her unconscious body—"My Fuyo," he'd whispered, "My sweet Fuyo, can you save her?"—to old, weary Gengai, the most learned man in town, and Gengai had laid her in a cot in his backroom and said "come back in three days" and then he'd taken her to Ayano's bar and told her father that she'd died.

"He was messing around with weird concoctions, is my guess," Gengai had told Ayano, "and was trying to anchor her consciousness permanently to her body. Went and did something very wrong, obviously, because she was on the verge of death. People shouldn't mess around with things they don't understand. Anyway, this is Tama." 

So Tama had moved in, taking the smallest room beside Catherine's and serving customers with a smile sweeter than even Ayano's when she was young.

Kagura loved her at first glance, had hugged her so tightly she'd nearly taken her head off. Shinpachi had been charmed by her manners just like Catherine had been eventually won over by her newborn earnestness, and between the three of them (Tama and Shinpachi and Catherine), Ayano felt she had enough sufficiently obedient brats to outweigh the worst of her hellions (meaning Kagura and Gintoki) though Catherine could be on the fence at times, oscillating between troublemaker and treasure.

Gintoki had taken one look at the girl and his eyes had softened. Ayano still isn't sure what he had thought of when he'd first seen her standing at attention at the back of the room, as poised as a corpse, but she thinks she might be beginning to understand.

"Am I human, Otose-sama?" Tama asks quietly, watching Kagura make s'mores between heated palms. "Am I a spirit that has occupied a human body? Do I owe my consciousness to my mother and my father, or do I owe it to Gengai-sama's experiments and the spirit world's machinations?"

"Philosophy isn't like you, Tama," Ayano answers. "What are you worried about?"

"I am unsure of what I am. I am unsure of where I came from. My body has roots, but the rest of me is unanchored. I feel like I should be able to bend. My memories tell me that Fuyo was an earthbender, but I don't feel any connection to the earth."

Tama's face does not scrunch up in her confusion and distress. It remains uncannily composed. The skin around her eyes is pale and flat, her mouth lax. Kagura has burped into Shinpachi's ear and is currently cackling at his disgusted screams.

"I do not feel like a person, sometimes," says Tama, so very honestly. She has stopped sweeping, but the broom remains neat and upright in her hands. "Is that a feeling you have felt?" 

"Not quite," says Ayano, shutting her eyes and considering the nature of personhood. 

"Eh, sometimes," says Gintoki, sitting down at the counter and pouring himself a drink from Ayano's own bottle. He ignores her comments about 'putting it on his tab' and throws it back, and it's a horrendous waste of good sake. 

Tama blinks at him. "Ah, Gintoki-sama." 

"Ah, Tama." 

"Gintoki-sama," says Tama. She says his name like a question. 

"Tama," Gintoki replies again. He shows no sign of saying anything else. The conversation is going in circles, so Ayano steps in.

"It doesn't matter where you came from," she says. "You're ours now."

°°°

Gintoki's cheeks are splotched with crimson and some other dark colour, and blood stains his face in the pattern of Shinsuke's knuckles, and red liquid leaks down the sides of their scratched faces like tears, red liquid plasters to their hair like rainwater on sticky summer evenings, and Shinsuke's hands are raw-red and scraped, his hands are heating up and lighting flashes behind his one eye.

Gintoki is saying, "Sensei is gone, Takasugi. He's not anywhere. Let him be. The dead are not gods. Only the living are so sacred." Blood trickles down from the tender place of his bruised temple. 

°°°

"Have you ever fought a firebender before, Gin-san?" Shinpachi asks absently, flinging his arms to the side and bending out a portion of the pond. 

The water around him is looking cleaner than it did before and a small pool of pride wells up in his chest at seeing the fruits of his hard work. 

Gin-san wheezes at him pitifully as he drags to shore a net filled with, well, a lot of sandals and disposable food containers, and all sorts of gross, weird stuff covered in algae, and it's really very disgusting and Shinpachi feels suddenly grateful that he was able to avoid dealing with the worst of the rubbish. He lucked out with this job. They've been contracted to clean out a pond on the outskirts of town, and good thing the owner was another earthbender and was perfectly fine—enthused, actually—about letting them use their bending to speed up the process because Shinpachi's not sure how they'd be able to properly clean the pond by just dragging bags of trash out of the water.

They have a pretty good set up right now, actually. Shinpachi bends out some of the pond water so they can see the murky bottom. Then Gin-san goes in waving his claw hand crossly and picks up the miscellaneous trash, drags them to land in piles. And then Kagura-chan, very happily, sets the piles on fire. A good set up. 

Oh, and there's also Sadaharu. Sadaharu has discovered his inner wild child and is casually flinging fish out of the water. Shinpachi would scold him for the waste, but he's eating them, so he can't really say much, especially because the polar bear dog doesn't get fresh meat very often. The odd jobs business is a pretty erratic one. Hopefully the owner won't mind his fish going missing. 

"What's with this conversation topic, huh," Gin-san grumbles, out of breath, "this isn't the kind of setting to be having discussions like these. What kind of timing do you have Pattsuan? What are you even thinking about? Get your head in the pond cleaning and out of the clouds." 

Shinpachi laughs. "I was just wondering, you know. Have you ever fought a firebender?" 

"Oi, what do you think happened in Yoshiwara, cherry boy?" he sighs. "Old Hosen was basically the definition of a firebender. He breathed fire, dammit. Of course I've fought firebenders before. What, you want tips or something? If you want a workout just threaten to steal Kagura's rice cooker, easy peasy."

Kagura starts snarling in the distance, her flaming piles of trash flaring up with the force of her fury. Sadaharu whines loudly through a mouthful of carp. "Leave my rice cooker alone!" 

"But before that," Shinpachi clarifies, ignoring her, "what about before that? I've started to notice that you dodge them really easily, and that has to come with a lot of experience, doesn't it? It's like your body is used to countering them, like you instinctively know how they fight. Is it because you were in the war?" 

Sadaharu bounds over to them, shaking his wet fur, and cheerfully pins Gin-san's head in his toothy maw. If you were to tilt your head a bit, it'd look a little like Sadaharu was biting down on his own fur, because their hair blends together so seamlessly. Then, once you've tilted your head back to its normal position, you would be able to see Gin-san's deeply unimpressed and deadpan expression. 

"Dodging? What's dodging?" says Gin-san. "Do you mean dogging? Dog? I could get you a dog. There's a dog right here. Sadaharu-kun, would you please give him a hug."

"It's really not that hard to answer a question, Gin-san."

The man finally tugs his head out of Sadaharu's mouth, grimacing at the saliva on his cheek. "You underestimate my stupidity, Pattsuan. I was the worst student of Shoka Sonjuku I'll have you know." 

"Oh yeah! Your school!" Shinpachi wades to shore, his voice rising higher in his excitement. "That's right! Katsura-san's an earthbender. He has really good control, I was so impressed the first time I saw him bend. He did this one move—the one where he, ah, he compresses smaller rocks into a big one, and he even made a sinkhole once. It was so cool. Have you seen him do that before?"

"Yeah," Gin-san says, sounding like he's remembering something that he would rather forget. "I have."

"He went to school with you! You told me once that you shared a sensei when you were younger, so you both have a lot of history with each other. I'm glad you have someone like that, honestly, even though Katsura-san's kind of embarrassing sometimes. Please tell him not to rub Sadaharu's stomach in the shampoo aisle next time you see him. People were asking me why I took a revolutionary and a polar bear dog into the grocers. Ah, but since Katsura-san's an earthbender, that doesn't explain the—hm. Yeah, I don't know anyone else who—" Shinpachi pauses.

Gin-san's watching Kagura practice her bending; his hands are limp in his lap. Kagura directs a stream of fire upwards, a blazing, glowing pillar lighting up in the midst of the clear sky. Promptly, she cuts off the flow and brings her arms down hard, spinning into a kick that expels a red-hot flame from the centre of her bare foot. The way he looks at her seems almost nostalgic, as if he has seen this very scene many times before.

"You were friends with Takasugi too, right?" Shinpachi asks him. 

Gin-san makes a rough, muted noise. "You could say that."

°°°

People have always said that his temper was way too hot for the kind of bender he is, incendiary and easily irritated. When he was younger, before he knew he was even a bender, the aunts and uncles used to whisper that his whore of a mother must have been from the Fire Nation, because he was such a temperamental child, and in that they found yet another reason to shun him from the family, like they hadn't already made it clear that he didn't belong. 

As a child, it used to tear him up inside. As a troubled youth, it only fueled his anger and the self-destructive tendencies that left him swinging desperate fists at riled up strangers. As an adult, as a soldier of the Earth Kingdom under the command of Isao Kondo, Toshiro finds that rumours no longer affect him, and that most people fall quickly in line if he threatens to drench them head to toe, and 'I fucking swear, there will be ice'. There will be ice.

"Don't you think it's kind of unfair, Hijikata-san," Yamazaki begs plaintively, like he hadn't ditched Toshiro with the picnic baskets to play Kabaddi with a bunch of random people. "It's really chilly. I'll definitely catch a cold if I get wet!" 

"If you stuck to the job I gave you in the first place then you wouldn't have this problem," Toshiro retorts coolly. He heaves up the bags of food, consisting of sandwiches, rice balls, a dozen different chip packets, a few containers of rice and vegetable tempura, and deposits them casually in Yamazaki's reluctant arms. Because he is in a forgiving mood, he spares Yamazaki his personal ice bucket challenge and makes his way across the park.

Sougo's fooling around with the Yorozuya's firebender brat near the center; they've vanished into a dizzying blur of hand-to-hand combat with some stray flames shooting out of the mess every now and then. Occasionally, one of Sougo's rock gauntlets fly astray and land suspiciously near Toshiro's head, or his metal whip lashes out suspiciously near Toshiro's hip, or he shouts a battle-cry that sounds suspiciously like 'Die Hijikata!' which really makes you wonder who he's trying to take down in this situation. 

Toshiro sighs. Next to him, Gintoki is immeasurably entertained. 

"Youthful energy, huh," he grins, sounding like he's about to laugh any moment. "Aren't you proud of your metalbending prodigy, Hijikata-kun?"

"Not when he's obviously trying to kill me," Toshiro grunts out. "Where was that youthful energy when we were making plans earlier, dammit? He has no sense of priorities. Why'd we make him a captain again?" 

"What? Don't ask me. I don't know how the Earth Kingdom military works." 

"You think I do?"

Gintoki reaches into his chip packet which coincidentally is the very same flavour and very same brand that Toshiro had packed into his team's baskets this morning. "You're the gorilla's Lieutenant. You do all the paperwork. If he knows more than you, I'll pour strawberry jam in my futon and lick it clean." 

"That's way too specific of a consequence. It's too unreasonable of a scenario. It sounds suspicious. Why did you think of that?"

"I dunno."

"Right. So I dunno how the Earth Kingdom works," Toshiro says plainly. "Most of our paperwork consists of reports to Old Man Matsudaira so he knows what's up in Kabukicho. Whether or not he passes it on or keeps it to himself isn't my business. We're too far away and unimportant to be consulted on anything involving the capital, or the country as a whole."

Gintoki raises his eyebrows. 

"So you're not even being useful?"

"Fuck you," says Toshiro. "We're here as obligatory troops. Kondo-san's a good captain and a good person, but the higher-ups don't like him, and his only other use in the capital was for reinforcing the walls. Since they have plenty other soldiers, and they don't trust me, they just sent our unit here." 

"Sounds like a headache," says the other man idly. "Is bending seriously such a big deal?" 

"You tell me. Kondo-san's the best leader we could have. He could be a General, but they've restricted his promotions because he's not a prodigious bender like Sougo, or whatever." He tries not to scowl, but with every moment spent lingering on the thought, his forehead creases in frustration. "And because I'm a waterbender and don't fit in their ideology of elemental purity—argh!"

Gintoki makes a quiet noise and turns his eyes upwards. The clouds are grey and heavy.

Toshiro exhales heavily through his nose. "Ah, I almost wish the Avatar would come back. Kabukicho's good, but things are tense; Earth Kingdom's trying to seal itself off and seal out its outcasts. Flaming bastards are getting antsy, and the Water Tribes might go the same way as the airbenders. But the last one was working with the Fire Nation. The trust has been broken, and who knows if it can be restored. We need a wind of change."

"A wind of change," Gintoki considers, under his breath. 

"Just to get things to fall in line," Toshiro explains. His words do nothing. Gintoki stuffs the rest of his chips into his mouth and looks away, tuning out of the conversation completely. On the other hand, Yamazaki finally drags himself over to the picnic blanket and at long last, everything is together, and Toshiro's thirst for organisation is temporarily sated. 

°°°

"Sometimes, on the battlefield," Zura tells him quietly, lying on the tatami to his left, "you look as if you are weightless. Like you're nothing more than low-lying fog, like you'll be gone by midday. Swift and unimpeded."

Zura inhales, something soft. "The rumour goes that you aren't human. Is it bad if that makes me feel better? Every time you go out on that field of fire, I'm scared you'll burn up and the only thing I can do is push rocks out of the ground. It feels like I'm just making gravestones. But if you aren't human, then maybe you can't die?"

He moves closer in the darkness. Everyone else is asleep. "I'm sorry. That was cruel of me to say. Sensei always told me… Ah. Forget that. I'm just tired. Of everything." He rolls back to his tatami, facing the cool, damp earth. "Goodnight."

°°°

"Ah, Kintoki! You're awake now! That's great, that's great!" 

"Wha?"

"You were passed out for a bit so I got a little bored. Ah, ah, Mutsu's gonna be real cross with me this time, haha, I don't even know where we are!"

Gintoki wakes up real blearily and it's sort of cute, in a dirty, dishevelled sort of way. His shaggy white mop is all mussed up, with bits of sand stuck in it and glinting like discount constellations under the late morning sun. He's squinting this funny, rust-red sort of squint that gives off the impression that he's trying to intimidate Tatsuma into telling him what's going on, but mostly makes him look like a very cranky and very matted snow-rat. If the snow-rat was living on the Southeastern coast of the Earth Kingdom and had a bad habit of drinking to forget, that is.

It's not a bad look for him. Sleepy, hungover Gintoki makes Tatsuma want to pat him on the head. He makes him want to punch him with a fist wrapped in granite. It's a mix of the two, actually. Tatsuma can't help but be curious about whether he'd dodge the blow or meet it head on. Maybe he's still a little drunk. 

"Tatsuma, what the hell?" sleepy Gintoki rumbles sleepily and with a good dose of half-conscious disbelief. Tatsuma turns to follow the line of his gaze and is met with the sight of dozens upon dozens of sandcastles. Well, he says they're sandcastles, but more accurately, they're piles of sand. That look somewhat like sand castles if you were to cross your eyes and think about them being sandcastles, which Tatsuma does easily enough but obviously Gintoki refuses to put more than the absolute minimum amount of effort in anything he does, so the sandcastles probably look like piles of sand to him.

"I got _really_ bored," Tatsuma says cheerfully. "Do you like them?"

"No."

"But I worked so hard!"

"That just makes me hate them more."

"They kind of remind me of—you know, back when it was the four of us,"—here Gintoki stiffens—"do you remember that? Ah, Zura always made them so neat and so sturdy, but he also got really creative. I remember this one time he used—what was it?—sandstone and slate to keep his walls steady and give them clean, pretty corners, and make sure they remained standing. So clever, Zura. So smart."

"Tatsuma," he starts, eyebrows furrowed over red eyes.

"And Takasugi! He didn't really get into it very much, but he came in handy when we needed to melt the rock together."

"Tatsuma," Gintoki says. 

"My favourite part was building upwards from the ground, as if I was making a mountain. I want to touch the sky, did you know, Kintoki? I've sailed all around the world, and I've seen the Water Tribes, and the Northern Water Tribe has a wall more beautiful and stronger than anything Zura ever made, it has buildings made of ice! I've seen all the air temples, and I've visited every tiny island on this side of the ocean—"

"You went drinking, didn't you? You went there to drink. You're too shameless."

"—and all I can think of is how much I want to touch the sky," Tatsuma says. "Do you remember that competition we had, a while back? I was really patient, I put so much effort into making these cute, tiny bricks, and I was building up and up and up. I seriously thought I was going to win—my tower was the tallest, and definitely the prettiest, and the sturdiest!"

Gintoki huffs, throwing his head back in the sand. "You were seriously annoying, that's what."

"But Takasugi and his glass tower still won! It was just this skinny, shiny thing that he made out of melted sand, and it broke so easily, but everyone liked it, and the thing that made me angriest was that it was taller than mine. He wasn't even trying, y'know?" 

"You're making this sound like a dick-measuring contest," says Gintoki. 

"For me," Tatsuma declares earnestly, "it might as well have been."

Gintoki flops backwards in the sand flat and spreads out his arms, almost as if he's offering them up to some otherworldly creature so it might take him away to the afterlife, and by default, away from Tatsuma. "Everything that comes out of your mouth makes me wonder how you were able to live this long."

To be honest, Tatsuma wonders about that himself. He looks down at the scar on his thigh, the one that fucked up his chi and his connection to the earth, that made it so he wouldn't ever be able to strike forward with his fist and have a pillar of earth jut out at his command, wouldn't ever be able to build shelters for his people with a stomp of his feet, wouldn't be able to sense his friends through the vibrations in the cold dirt, wouldn't be able to summon great, granite columns to let him reach the clouds. 

Not anymore. 

"If I'm always watching the sky," Tatsuma explains half-heartedly, "then I forget there's a ground to fall down to."

"That makes no sense at all," says Gintoki, casting him an unimpressed glare. "Shut up."

°°°

Shoyo-sensei set up his school just a little way out from the small Earth Kingdom village that Kotaro and his grandmother lived in. The building was an oddly elegant combination of wood and stone, with smooth arches and woven reed mats. Some of the walls were made of strips of overlapping bamboo, and others were cool, dark basalt, slotted seamlessly together. 

Interestingly, the way that the school was built made it so that in the summer, when it was hot, the air flowed easily through openings, ventilating the rooms, ushering the smell of sweat and syrup-sticky hands back outside, and in the winter, all you had to do was close the gaps over with thin screens, and the warmth stayed obediently in. 

Since he's left the village school and joined Shoyo's, Kotaro's noticed details in the architecture that remind him of the buildings in the village, and of the pictures he's seen in books of the palaces in the Earth capital. When he points this out to Takasugi, the other boy mutters that the reed mats and sheets remind him of traditional Fire Nation houses. 

"It helps with temperature regulation, I think," Takasugi squints. "In humid places, plant materials are usually easy to find and they're strong while still letting the building breathe. If I remember right, some of the tribes in the more tropical regions used to prop their houses up on bamboo poles for max ventilation."

"Wow," Kotaro says wonderingly. "That's ingenious."

Takasugi puffs up with pride and seems to visibly rack his mind for more information.

He bursts out with another, but Kotaro's already read about it, so then he tries to recall more facts but gets quickly frustrated when he finds his memory failing him, and in the end, Kotaro watches him stomp off to find Shoyo and ask him to listen to him practice playing the shamisen. Takasugi's a hot-tempered kind of brat. 

"I think I'm getting tired of this," Kotaro sighs. "We were having a really good conversation, but he got embarrassed."

"Bakasugi's weird about not knowing things," Gintoki remarks blithely. "He wants to be a know-it-all but he's too much of a moron." 

Kotaro frowns. "Don't be crude." 

"M'gonna be as rude as I want." 

"This is why you have a concussion," he tells the white-haired boy. "When will you learn that there's a direct correlation between what you say and how many times Sensei will discipline you?" He pauses. "Look at your head. If you keep mouthing off then you'll have bumps larger than the antlers of a sabre-toothed moose lion." 

Gintoki wrinkles his nose at the image. 

"Shoyo'd heal me before it would get that far," he says, which is a rather out-of-place comment, but if there was a nonbender skilled enough and smart enough to save Gintoki from his inevitable death by tactless snarkiness, it would be Shoyo-sensei. And it's nice of Gintoki to have so much trust in their teacher, especially when he's such a terror to everyone else. 

"That's if you didn't make him cross beforehand." 

"Oi, what's this blasphemy? I never make Shoyo cross!"

"You definitely cause him way too much stress. He doesn't like it," Kotaro says, "when you and Takasugi argue with each other. Well, actually, he does. When you're arguing over height or something meaningless—height is meaningless, Gintoki, I really mean it, it doesn't matter as much as you think it does, no, I'm not saying that because you're taller than me, what no, of course I'm going to grow more, hey, stop distracting me!—anyway, he thinks it's cute, probably. But when you fight, you know, about bending, and when you say Takasugi's going to go up in flames—his own flames—one day, because he gets so riled up—I think it stresses Sensei out. Or makes him sad." 

Gintoki curls his toes in the grass in the garden of the little school, the garden they're sitting in right now, and he picks up the sword that Kotaro heard Shoyo gave him. He looks a little guilty. 

"Takasugi was originally the son of a noble," Kotaro says, "but he deserted his family and his nation, and he came to study here." 

The story is actually a lot longer; there was a lot more screaming involved, not from Takasugi, but from his father, and some of his brothers, and there were also a few emotionally tense existential crises, and a couple of charred scrolls from when Takasugi tried expressing his feelings through poetry but his emotions became a little too intense. There's a bag with Takasugi's family insignia buried underneath one of the trees on the fringes of the school grounds and a scar on his shoulder from when his father placed a searing hand against his back and turned him away from the house he was born in. 

"Takasugi throws back just as hard," Gintoki says, his mouth a thin line. He was with Shoyo longer than the rest of them, Kotaro remembers. He was the first. Gintoki's story is probably just as long, maybe even longer. 

"Ah. I guess he did call you a useless liability first." 

Gintoki flings his head around and stares furiously with wide, wine-red eyes. "You guess? _You guess?"_

"Because you called him a fire-ferret." 

"Zura," Gintoki says wildly, unable to say anything else. He waves his arms in the air and shouts for a very, very long time. He shouts about things like how people insulting each other in turns should take into consideration the type of and level of insults thrown initially, and then adjust the level of _their_ insults to make sure it escalates at just the right, engaging pace. He says something about how it's an art form. The way his entire body is wholly immersed in his passionate lecture might be called an art form in itself. 

"I think," Kotaro says, ignoring how Gintoki is saying that he has 'never thought ever' because that's objectively untrue, "that you just feed the flames of rage in Takasugi." 

Pausing his demonstration, Gintoki says sullenly, "Or maybe he's just crazy."

°°°

Gin-chan looks at her carefully, his chest rising and falling at a slow, steady pace. His legs are crossed beneath him and his palms resting on his knees, and his face is solemn. His eyes are solemn. They are red like a blood moon. 

"Firebending is about breath," he tells her, and Kagura guides the wind into her lungs gently. The air nourishes the little flame in her chest. She has been breathing since she was born, but this is the first time it feels like it could be sacred.

°°°

Tatsuma laughs, his voice like an earthquake, vibrations quaking in his chest. Vibrations quake the earth around him as he splits the rock, erecting column after column. "Ahaha, look! It's Kintoki! He's flipping off my earth pillars. Whoa, that's a pretty strong somersault, did your teacher make gymnastics compulsory in your school or something? He's doing flips like a grasshopper. And come to think of it, you do a mean dive roll too." 

"What's he doing?" Takasugi hisses angrily, like a scorned cat. If he really were a cat, his fur would definitely be bristling, both from the building static in the air—so dense, so strong that Tatsuma can feel it even though he isn't attuned to the element—and from the sight of Gintoki 'flouncing around with his fucking sword'. "We're not here to be flashy, we're here to fight a battle—he's leaving himself open to their weapons."

Tatsuma shakes his head. "I don't think so. He's dodging them pretty well. If I used him as cover, I could get down and make a dent in their forces." 

It looks like Zura's already had the self-same idea, sneaking down under the banner of Gintoki's white haori, half soaked through with red. He's shaking with the exertion of it, and it's so visible that Tatsuma is terrified someone will see him and think 'vulnerable' but Gintoki's distraction works as well as ever as he launches himself from the top of a cannon, already wrecked and ruined, and Zura's eyes squeeze shut as a final gaping chasm forms slowly behind the enemy lines, swallowing dozens and dozens of soldiers and closing back up. 

Gintoki roars, this terrible, wordless battle-cry, and when Tatsuma sneaks a glance at Takasugi, red-orange-yellow tongues of fire flaring out from the centres of his palms, the shadow of lightning framing his back, it looks as if his breath has been taken away.

°°°

Shoyo dies. The core of the world is cut out. 

'How unfair' Gintoki thinks. 'Thank you' says Shoyo. 

°°°

There is a child wandering the flat land beneath the abandoned air temple. Its hair is pale like mountain-top fog and it goes barefoot among the long grass. In the evening, it vanishes into the cliff face, and people say it is tearing the flesh from dead bodies and drinking their blood because when it emerges again in the morning its tiny hands are red and its cheeks look wet under the faint morning light. 

"A spirit," whisper the villagers. "A vengeful spirit. It can't be human."

"A ghost, a ghost," giggle the village children. "An airbender ghost. It changes the direction of the wind when it's sad."

The Avatar steps onto the empty plain and thinks about wildfires and air currents and sunlight through floating particles of dust, growing things, flowing things, and things that change the world. 

"How cute," he calls the little creature he has found among the human bodies. Wide eyes peer back at him, and he finds himself becoming fond. 

_bear with me it wasn’t long ago I was brainless_

_lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth chewing them_

_into pure light so much of me then was nothing_

River of Milk — Kaveh Akbar

**Author's Note:**

> i've made a monster!!!!!!!!! aka: another love letter to sakata gintoki, ahaha


End file.
